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Book Review: ‘Success with Stress’, by Jae Ellard

May 4, 2017

About the Author

After years in senior communication roles crafting content for executives, Jae collapsed from stress-related adrenal fatigue. This life-altering experience propelled her to research human behavior, neuroscience, mindfulness, and organizational relationship systems.

In 2008, Jae founded Simple Intentions and developed the Mindful Life™ Program, which includes four group coaching workshops to generate reflection, awareness and action at the organizational and individual levels. Jae has taught the skill of awareness to thousands of employees at multinational corporations in more than 50 countries including China, Russia, India, Japan, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Germany, United Kingdom, Norway, and the United States.

Jae contributes to the Awareness at Work column for Mindful Magazine, the Healthy Living section on Huffington Post as well as the Simple Intentions blog. Jae has a master’s degree in Communication Management from Colorado State University and a bachelor’s degree in Broadcast Communication from Metropolitan State College of Denver. She holds certificates in co-active coaching and organizational relationship systems coaching and is the author of seven books.

About the Book

Believe it or not, stress isn’t all bad; in fact, it’s an important part of the natural world. Stress helps us survive as a species – because of that we want the ability to be stressed. That said, being able to MANAGE STRESS WITH GREATER SUCCESS is the difference between surviving and THRIVING. Success with Stress explores five simple ideas to spark your personal power to change the level, duration, and frequency of the stress in your life. With workplace stress being linked to quality of life, health, and workplace morale, this is a must-read for any team looking to improve morale and individuals looking to improve their quality of life.

Book Review

The previous Jae Ellard book I reviewed, The Five Truths About Work-Life Balance, became (and still is) and notebook of sorts. While I have only had Success With Stress for a week now and have yet to jot anything down, I know it’s going to become the same thing: an on-going tool that I will use for quite some time to come.

Yet again, despite being void of either a ton of pages (total page count: 85) or a wealth of words on each page (some count only three words!) or of the trappings ones usually associates with a book that needs studying—I’m thinking a thick book with lots of words and maybe even some tables and graphs, covered in colour-coded sticky notes with sections highlighted in different colours and a stack of notecards on the side—Ellard manages to engage readers in a deep study of the stress in their lives, in such a way that they can accept it as a positive thing and mould their way around it, skillfully, gracefully, and almost painlessly.

Because I have experience with her books, I was anticipating the self-explanatory statements, made with the assumption that the reader is not, as is most often the case, a passive recipient of wisdom, but rather an empowered protagonist in his or her own life. Each of these statements serve as a beginning, tracing the broad direction of the road, but leaving to the reader the responsibility of figuring out its twists and turns.

If you are looking for a magical, quick-fix solution, then don’t bother. But then again, you shouldn’t be looking for such a thing. Rather, you should engage in a long-term, thoughtful process of reflection and action, and this book is a great coach of sorts in this regard. And you will know that you are working well with this coach if your copy ends up covered in notes, preferably jotted at different times during different readings.

It feels like, after being encouraged to see stress as one of the many evils we have to conquer, we, as a North American society, are starting to realise that stress is a great tool—if we don’t overdo it and if we learn how to manage it. We are also taking a big step back from the understanding that we are meant to be passive recipients and taking our place as active protagonists in our personal development. Ellard’s Success With Stress, just like The Five Truths About Work-Life Balance, can come in as quite the handy companion in this regard.